Advances in video equipment and network transmission has led to the development of affordable video conference systems that enable individuals, or groups of individuals, at separate locations to share video images and audio information with each other across conventional networks without requiring inordinately high bandwidth. Present day video conference systems typically include one or more individual monitors, each displaying images from cameras at one or more remote locations. In the event of multiple remote cameras, a video conference monitor will typically display the image capture by each remote camera in a separate window. Displaying the individual camera images in separate windows leads to unattractive tiling of the display screen, and results in large amounts of wasted screen space allocated to the gaps between people (or windows) and lots of background images. Because of the wasted space, the video conference participants in such a display appear much smaller than life-size. For this reason, typical video conference systems employ a nearly room-sized screen or a collection of large monitors in order to provide a life-sized display of the participants.
Recently, video conferencing has become available for consumer use in the form of a telepresence system that allows subscribers of network-supplied content, such as cable television subscribers, to view shared content among themselves while simultaneously exchanging images of each other. For ease of discussion, the term “participants” will identify such network system subscribers that participate in a telepresence system session. The same problem of displaying individual video images on a single monitor incurred by commercial video conference systems also plagues consumer telepresence systems. However, the solutions employed to address this problem in commercial video conference systems, such as large screen monitors, are impractical for use in a consumer telepresence environment.
Thus, a need exists for a technique for realistically displaying the images of telepresence system participants.